Teflon, "Gunk," & More: Products That Became Words

Top 10 Words from Trademarks, Vol. 2

In 1938, a chemist working in a DuPont laboratory found that the refrigerant gases he'd left in a tank had mysteriously been replaced by a very slippery and highly heat-resistant substance - polytetrafluoroethylene resin.

This resin would soon become famous, and considerably easier to say, as Teflon. Its popularity as a stick-resistant cooking surface has given the word another sense too.

The figurative sense originated when Congresswoman Pat Schroeder was cooking eggs for her children and thought of dubbing Ronald Reagan "the Teflon President" - to whom no criticism would stick.

During that same era, mobster boss John Gotti (shown here) was nicknamed the "Teflon Don" for slickly avoiding serious criminal charges. When Gotti was finally convicted on thirteen counts including murder, the head of the New York City FBI office announced, "The Teflon is gone. The don is covered with Velcro, and every charge stuck."

(As it relates to fluorine-based polymer derivatives, Teflon® is a registered trademark of E.I. du Pont Nemours and Company.)

In the 1930s, motorcycle enthusiast Alton Curran patented a cleaning solvent and named it "Gunk."

The cleaning brand Gunk lives on.

Ironically, however, its name – perhaps because it sounds like a combination of "goo" and "junk" – has evolved into a term for the kind of "filthy, sticky, or greasy matter" that the product is designed to remove.

When Swiss engineer Georges de Mestral had burrs stick to his clothes on a hunting trip in the Alps in 1941, he got the idea for the fastener known as Velcro.

Appropriately, the name he gave his product joins two words together: velours (meaning "velvet," in French) and crochet (meaning "hooks").

Astronauts were among the first to use Velcro, but it soon proved helpful in regular gravity as well. The term Velcro is now widely used for "a closure consisting of a piece of fabric of small hooks that sticks to a corresponding fabric of small loops."

Velcro parents, meanwhile, is a new term that's emerged for those who cling to their college-bound kids. We'll see if it sticks.

The generic term is "in-line skates," but many people refer to them by the trademark Rollerblades.

In-line skates are actually the oldest kind of roller skates, dating back to the late 1700s.

In the late 1800s a version of roller skates with two parallel sets of wheels (sometimes called "quads") allowed skaters to turn and maneuver easily, and launched a roller skating craze in the U.S. and Western Europe.